How Browsers Work: Behind the scenes of modern web browsers

In the years of IE 90% dominance there was nothing much to do but regard the browser as a “black box”, but now, with open source browsers having more than half of the usage share, it’s a good time to take a peek under the engine’s hood and see what’s inside a web browser. Well, what’s inside are millions of C++ lines…

This is how Tali Garsiel introduces the journey that brought her into the depths of the web browsers’s source code.

I was looking for an insight about some browser’s behaviours, specifically the performance boost one can have on a browser by hiding elements using the CSS property display:none which seems to bear the same effects as deleting the DOM nodes altogether. I wanted to understand how exactly the rendering process is managed, and luckily I found her work published on HTML5rocks, introduced and cleaned up by Paul Irish. The original version is also available on her personal web site : http://taligarsiel.com/Projects/howbrowserswork1.htm.

The document is REALLY long, reason why despite my fair English skills the reading did get difficult after a while, still the topics discussed are very important for a better understanding of what is the daily work tool of all the web develpers.